"Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing" (PDF)
"Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing" (PDF)
"Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing" (PDF)
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46<br />
<strong>Interactive</strong> <strong>Food</strong> & <strong>Beverage</strong> Marketing | The New Digital Marketing Landscape<br />
Recruiting Brand Advocates<br />
With more and more young people creating their own online “user-generated<br />
content,” marketers are encouraging them to “co-create” and promote commercials for<br />
their favorite brands. 190 What better way to engage consumers with brands than to have<br />
them create the advertising themselves? 191 The new buzzwords in the industry are “consumer-generated”<br />
or “brand-generated” media. In marketing circles, the two terms are<br />
often used interchangeably, suggesting an intentional blurring of roles. The strategy is<br />
designed to foster powerful emotional connections between consumers and products, tap<br />
into a stable of young creative talent willing to offer their services for free, and produce a<br />
new generation of “brand advocates.” <strong>Food</strong> and beverage companies are actively<br />
engaged in a variety of user-generated media campaigns:<br />
• For the 2007 Super Bowl, Pepsi’s Frito-Lay division urged consumers to produce<br />
their own commercial spots for Doritos tortilla chips and submit them online in<br />
the “Doritos Smash the Super Bowl Contest.” In addition to a chance at a firstplace<br />
airing during the mega sports TV event, participants competed for the five<br />
finalist spots, which were made available online at Crashthesuperbowl.com and<br />
on YouTube and other online video sites. More than a thousand video ads were<br />
submitted, with “thousands of fans” voting for their favorites. One of the finalists<br />
reported that his video was viewed 200,000 times at the Yahoo! website, with<br />
the winning entry attracting nearly 400,000 views. 192<br />
• Fight for the Flavor (FftF) is part of the larger Doritos Snack Strong Productions<br />
site (http://www.doritos.com/, which also includes the “Crash the Super Bowl”<br />
user-made commercial archive and the “Flavor Lab” product gallery). FftF<br />
serves, in a sense, as an online, animated equivalent of a focus group, in which<br />
users interact with dueling bags of Doritos (Wild White Nacho vs. Smokin’<br />
Cheddar BBQ) to determine which of the two new flavors should be brought to<br />
market: “Cast your vote. Win delicious prizes. Shame opponents in an online<br />
match of no-holds-barred ultimate fighting.” Registered users (who must submit<br />
their name, e-mail and postal addresses, and phone number) can “login to the<br />
multi-player arena and take on other flavor fighters to earn a spot on the leaderboard.”<br />
They are also eligible to cast votes (either online or via mobile phone<br />
text messages) for their flavor preference and are eligible to win one of ten<br />
grand prizes (a year’s supply of Doritos) or one of five thousand first prizes<br />
(Doritos T-shirt). 193<br />
• Wendy’s launched a contest on the youth site Bolt.com, inviting teens to contribute<br />
“tracks to a song in progress,” as part of an online “audition” for performing<br />
spots with the “Bolt Band.” 194<br />
• At Viacom’s online teen channel, “the N,” visitors can use the website’s “Video<br />
Mixer” to create their own ads for Skittles and email them to their friends. “We<br />
view this as one of the most innovative digital media products that a major<br />
media company has launched on the Internet,” commented an industry<br />
analyst. 195